Teacher bombs karaoke in most awkward first day of school ever

Earning respect in the classroom is a brutal, painstaking endeavor for any teacher, especially in high school. There are no shortcuts—a fact one teacher is learning the hard way after a video of her cringeworthy classroom karaoke on the first day of school went viral.

Apparently, this teacher thought she could connect with #teens by speaking their language. With rental DJ lights twirling and a slideshow projector handling the lyrics, she awkwardly makes her way through a seven-plus-minute Top 40 medley—Rihanna’s “Work,” Fifth Harmony’s “Work From Home,” Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” among others—substituting the original lyrics with lines like “Math is what you came for.” It’s excruciating.

You might never want to Drake’s “Hotline Bling” again.

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I get where she’s coming from: There’s some research to support the idea that you can more quickly gain trust by showing vulnerability or making a clumsy error. Many professionals have their own tricks they casually employ, like spilling coffee or dropping a pencil—something simple that shows they make mistakes too.

But this… This is like falling off a desk in a trust exercise when there’s no one even there to catch you. It’s brutal to watch. There’s nothing more embarrassing than sober karaoke.

That doesn’t mean the teacher deserves to have a classroom video go viral, especially since this has Tosh.0 written all over it. After all, she basically epitomizes an “E” for “Effort,” and you have to appreciate her commitment to see it through despite her students’ complete lack of engagement.

Even in her pop medley, however, she warns about the dangers of social media (“You need to be careful when you’re online; the things you post we can always find”), and if a student filmed seven minutes of something like this in class, they'd probably have been called out.

As for the rest of the students trapped in the background of a viral video—well, the worst of the school year is (hopefully) already over.

At first glance, there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening in Jackson, Wyoming. Come to think of it, there’s nothing particularly interesting happening in the quiet mountain town on second or third glance, either. But that hasn’t stopped thousands of people from breathlessly tuning into a livestream of the town square for close to 24 hours now.